


Masters of Death

by withered



Series: these violent delights [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Body Horror, Bucky as Death, Bucky gives gifts, Destructive Tendencies, Forced Experimentation, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, I do it for the metaphor, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War, They're NSFW but not the fun kind, They're both like: Let's be lonely together, Tony as Death, winteriron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 19:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17586860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withered/pseuds/withered
Summary: It figures that if Howard couldn’t be a god, he'd find a way to be the person that makes one.





	Masters of Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lovinthepizzalife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovinthepizzalife/gifts).



 

Tony wakes and knows he isn’t dead.

Not that he would be.

He’s been through everything; a crappy childhood, numerous ODs, an attempted murder, kidnapping, torture, captivity, open-heart surgery in a cave, a car battery to his chest, cancerous poisoning, a wormhole, _aliens_ , Norse Gods, the Hulk, and a Super Soldier throwdown.

He’s fine.

He’s always fine.

Pulling himself to his feet, he waves off DUM-E’s worried beeping and lets Friday’s soothing lilt inform him of the current state of his body: spinal cord dislocation, C2 to C4, snapped right ulna, cracked sternum, a fracture to the back of his skull, internal bleeding from a hole in his lung, and a pesky reminder that his liver is near failing. The last is like a “check engine” light he always ignores, figures this time he has an excuse.

 _The Rogues are coming home_.

Pepper will forgive him so long as she doesn’t see the blood on the floor.

Not that she or Rhodey would be coming around any time soon. He’d made sure to repel them away as much as possible.

Both Pepper and Rhodey have had too many close calls for his taste over the years. It might be too late, but Tony's not willing to risk them anymore. It isn't fair on them. If recent history has shown Tony anything, it was safer to be far away from him.

Friday turns the flat screen on as he walks past to get to the bathroom, lights turning on seamlessly as he steps inside. The murmur of some broadcast muffled further by the rush of water from the tap.

He doesn’t bother to look at his reflection over the sink, conscious that _he_ _can’t_.

But his body’s made decisions without him before, and it won’t stop now.

The eyes of his reflection bleeds blue as Howard’s serum knits him back together, and Tony can’t help but think that Howard always did give him the worst gifts.

Not that making his only son indestructible had been any intention of his.

Howard had been aiming to replicate the Super Soldier serum that had made Steve, and when he’d been shut down due to those bothersome arguments about it being a crime against man itself, still fuming that Hydra had managed to create something similar in the Winter Soldier, Howard turned to the only test subject he could get: Tony.

Maria couldn’t stop him, and Howard was callously insistent that if Tony failed, they could always have another.

But Tony didn’t fail.

Howard did.

Without the original data and formulas, Howard hadn’t made a Super Soldier, he’d made something else: a son so opposed to death that no matter how he tried (and he did), Tony just _wouldn’t die_. And Howard, loathed to prove anyone right that he couldn’t play god, never told anyone of his failure, of Tony’s perversion.

Not that anyone would ever guess.

Everyone ramped up his close encounters with death as nothing more than a result of the target drawn on his back – everyone wanted a piece of the brilliant billionaire-genius-philanthropist, after all, and Tony always did have a reputation for being accommodating to a fault.

It’s why everyone just assumed he’d house the Rogues, welcome them back into heart and home and let bygones-be-bygones.

The water is brisk against his lips, slides down his throat like ice, and he wishes it were only that simple.

The arc reactor glows blue in his chest as his skin raises with engorged blood vessels, his nerves running hot and bright, lighting him up; his muscles shifting like they had a mind of their own all while bones creaked and groaned and _snapped_ back into place.

It takes minutes – hours – days? until Tony rises from his hunch over the bathroom sink, tastes metal on his tongue, but when he spits, there’s nothing but a cosmos of blue against the porcelain.

He remembers Maria threatening to murder Howard if he touched Tony again after that, remembers Howard throwing her against the wall, her head leaving an indent, in reply. Her eyes never did open blue like Tony’s did. They didn’t open for two days.

He'd never realized, until then, how easy it was to lose someone, how hard it was to be alone. 

When Tony finally thinks he can look himself in the mirror again, his eyes are as brown as hers, and he can’t decide if that’s worse than the blue.

God, he had the worst headache.

Friday intones that his liver has stabilized and that’s as much a distraction as it is a taunt.

He hadn’t known, genius as he was, that something had been wrong with him.

Obie had always smiled coldly and inferred that Tony had always been a hardy squirt as he encouraged another bottle, another needle, another and another.

It was only after the Palladium poisoning, only after SHIELD and Fury that he realized the extent of his father’s bullshit.

Fury had said, “You were his greatest creation.”

And he’d snorted, “Yeah, the monster to his Frankenstein.”  And there was an irony in looking back at it and realizing how _right_ Tony had been then, and how he’d been right all along that SHIELD was nothing more than a Super-Secret Boy Band: The antidote they’d found of Howard’s, and forcibly injected into him, had only ramped up Tony’s recovery time, doubled the dosage of the initial experimentations, and made him deathless.

Perhaps, that had always been the plan.

On one of many of Howard’s drunken rages, he’d declare that that’s exactly what Tony was, if Tony couldn’t die, perhaps he was Death itself.

It figures that if Howard couldn’t be a god, he'd find a way to be the person that makes one.

Merchant of Death, Tony had thought, how the ironies never cease.

Maybe Death is who he’d always been meant to be. Maybe, that’s who he was all along.

Maybe, he muses, that’s why everyone around him kept dying.

He takes another drink, practically seeing the flare of that pesky “check engine” light on his liver and ignoring it anyway.

Ignores it like he ignores Friday’s murmur that he has a visitor.

Barnes stands in the Workshop, near the workbench with a box that hadn’t been there before. It was a substantial enough size, the box, no bigger than those fancy hat boxes trimmed in black, and Tony thinks in sardonic amusement that the Winter Soldier brought him a hat. 

“Moving day isn’t until tomorrow, Tin Can,” he drawls.

“It’s for you,” Barnes croaks as if he unused to speaking at all, and Tony’s intrigued.

It could be anything, a tiny assassin in a box or, more likely, a bomb. But Tony’s learned to stop hoping that something will kill him, that anything  _could._ Barnes already failed once, he and everyone else will keep failing.

Reaching for the box, though, Barnes stops him.

Making a noise of disbelief, Tony eyes him nearly offended before Friday begins the introductions, giving a name, making connections and stating affiliations and then, Tony repeats in obvious bafflement, “I know him, he used to work for Obie.”

“Emphasis on ‘used to’,” Friday informs. “After Stane’s death, he went underground, liaising with known Hydra operatives before reappearing under a new alias.”

“He’s not important,” Barnes adds in the ensuing silence. “Not to anyone else. But he’d been the one that decided to target your mother.”

Tony’s eyes widen almost comically. “So, you brought me his head.”

“I didn’t choose Bucharest for nothing,” is his dry reply. He pauses before, "He's the man who said the words, I'm the one that did the deed." He licks his lips then and says quieter, “I have a gun.”

“Oh,” Tony says, amused at the abrupt change in topic, “what’re you gonna do with it?”

“Put a bullet in my brain,” he replies, blue eyes earnest. "Super Soldiers are tough to kill, but no one gets up from that.”

“I have.”  

The other man doesn’t seem phased but that declaration, saddened maybe, and Tony can’t find it in himself to be surprised.

Barnes had been unwillingly experimented on, brought to life over and over again for the sole purpose of bringing death to others. He’d know what it was like to beg for the only mercy he was not allowed. 

If anyone knows Death better than Tony, it’s Barnes.

So, he isn’t surprised, shouldn’t be, when Barnes says, “I can’t give you healing, I can’t give you anything you’d actually want. But I can give you violence. I can give you death."

And perhaps it won’t be forever, perhaps, Tony will lose Barnes too. He loses everyone eventually.

But perhaps, this too was meant to be.

“What a coincidence,” Tony drawls, a smirk curling at his lips, “so can I.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Pizza talked me into Deathless Tony which is my jam because the angst is delicious. But I'm also winteriron trash so there's that. 
> 
> I decided not to put this with Who's Been Lovin' You Good purely because most of what happens deals with stuff from pre-CW and Howard's shitty parenting. IDK Pizza is a bad influence so I might just start a new collection purely to make people sad with headcanons, and then attempt to fix them (maybe), but let me know what you think.
> 
> As always, you can find me at everything-withered on tumblr.
> 
> [Click here if you want to find out more about my work](https://everything-withered.tumblr.com/)


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